The present invention relates to a guitar and related apparatus for permitting a player to suspend the guitar from his or her shoulders in a horizontal orientation or a vertical orientation.
It is again becoming popular to play lap steel guitars, which are played using a bar (or steel) to engage the strings of the guitar instead of pressing down on the string to engage the frets of the guitar. A popular variant of lap steel guitar is slide guitar, where a tube (a slide) is slipped over a finger and used instead of the solid bar to engage the strings. The lap steel guitar was developed in Hawaii in the late 1800s and various people have been credited with the innovation. The instrument was hugely popular in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. The popularity of lap steel guitar remained strong enough to sustain manufacturers in the U.S. through the middle 1950's.
FIG. 1A is an illustration of a Chandler electric lap steel guitar having a solid body and a Weissenborn profile. One of the distinguishing features of a lap steel guitar is that the strings are raised at both the nut and bridge ends of the fingerboard, typically to about half an inch. This makes the frets unusable in the usual way of playing a conventional guitar. Other lap steel guitars are designed to be adapted between lap and conventional playing, or are modified versions of conventional guitars, with the differences usually being the action height. Guitars designed for lap playing typically have modified necks that make conventional playing impossible. The electric lap steel guitar typically incorporates the entire neck into the solid body of the guitar, providing extra strength to allow a greater variety of string gauges and tunings. The neck is of a square cross section and very thick, which also gives the neck extra strength.
Lap steel guitars are designed to be played horizontally, typically placed on the player's lap, or on a stool or platform in front of the player, who is seated. Thus, one rarely if ever sees strap mounting hardware on a lap steel guitar. (Contrast this to the slide guitar, which is played vertically using a conventional two-point strap.) It is difficult if not impossible to play a lap steel instrument standing up using a conventional strap. Indeed, the lap steel guitar is a solid body instrument of only about two inches thickness. Thus, when a lap steel guitar is suspended from a conventional two-point strap, there is very little thickness to provide stability to maintain the horizontal orientation. If suspended from a two-point strap, the lack of body thickness of the lap steel guitar would tend to result in rotation back to the vertical position.
In 1928 the Dopyera Brothers introduced a new type of acoustic slide guitar in which they placed a metal resonator in the middle of the soundboard. These slide guitars were very successful, so much so that they are still known today as a “DoBro” (a contraction of Dopyera and Brothers). The DoBro has become a generic term for guitars having a metal resonator on the soundboard. The DoBro guitars are slide guitars played in the horizontal position (i.e., not played with the face of the guitar in the vertical position but, rather, in the horizontal position), and are played in a standing position. Playing standing up permits the full output from the acoustic instrument because the backside of the guitar is free to resonate (as opposed to being pressed against the player's body or lap). The DoBro is played using a solid steel (as opposed to a tube) to adjust the effective string length.
One of the major problems with DoBro guitars is the fact that they are somewhat difficult to keep stable in the horizontal position because they are always slung from a strap around the player's neck and/or shoulders with a conventional two-point strap. The thicker acoustic body of the DoBro provides more stability than the solid-body lap steel guitar (discussed above) when slung from the two-point strap. (The DoBro, being an acoustic instrument, includes a fairly thick body—approximately four to five inches thick.) However, stability of the DoBro is still a problem and, thus, players tend to stabilize the guitar with the underside of their right forearm (if they are right-handed players), or with the heel of their right hand. This is a significant limitation to playing the DoBro, as the player's hand is not as free to move as it might otherwise be.
Another problem with suspending the DoBro guitar from a conventional two-point strap relates to the shape of the body. Since the DoBro is an acoustic instrument, and is an adaptation of conventional acoustic guitars, it has a very similar shape to regular acoustic guitars, usually manifesting the traditional figure-8 shape with a rounded, butt-end. This body shape is problematic in presenting the playing surface (fret board) to the left of center of the player's body (for a right handed player). Indeed, the DoBro tends to center itself on the two-point strap, which does not place the fret board to a left-of-center position (for a right-handed player). Instead the fret board is positioned too far to the right (for right handed players) such that the players fret-hand (the hand that moves the bar or slide—often the left hand of right-handed players) cannot easily access the higher frets of the guitar. The fret board of the guitar aligns too far opposite to the fret-hand, which requires the player to reach across his or her body at a drastic angle to access the higher frets.
Another problem with both the DoBro guitar and the lap steel guitar is that they have really no practical ability to be played hanging vertically on a two-point strap. This is so for two reasons: first, the action of the strings is usually set very high; and second, the DoBro and lap steel guitars have a very thick, square neck (for example as seen FIG. 1B). Thus, if a DoBro or lap steel guitar were suspended vertically from a conventional strap, the player would not be able to comfortably work the strings with a slide or his fingers.
The lap steel guitar and the DoBro guitar are associated most closely with Hawaiian music, country music and bluegrass, though some players have used them in rock, jazz, blues, and other musical genres. The round neck, metal-bodied resonator guitar, on the other hand, is used almost exclusively by Blues, Rock, or Blues-Rock musicians.
In short, the convention guitar design, whether lap steel guitars, slide guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, etc., is not easily played standing up in the horizontal orientation. Further, those guitars that are designed for horizontal playing cannot easily be played in the vertical orientation suspended from a conventional strap. The problems associated with playing DoBro guitars standing up have limited the commercial acceptance and use of the instrument.